Linden says we are competing
Benning says we are competing
Aquilini says we are competing
Team cleared space to make changes
Team targeted Bonino over prospects/picks
Team dealt a 3rd for a late 20s 4th liner
Targeted Iginla
Targeted Miller
They want to compete but they just seem stunned and unprepared for the prices, which they should not have been since Van is a mess atm, agents and playera know it. Nobody is coming here unless we meet or beat prices and term, who ever signs is coming for the cash not the playoffs, the team is full of young talent a player can hitch a ride with to the top (Avs or TB).
Hopefully the stay out of the UFA market, accept the state of the team and instead rebuild. They blew an opportunity to sell a rebuild as a chance to see prospects grow using a new GM plus Linden would have made it a positive to the STH. Instead watching an aging team struggle and muddle through by adding more vets will result in more disgruntled fans.
What management says and what they are thinking can be very different.
Anybody who watches hockey knows that UFAs always come overpriced and overrated. I highly doubt that someone who has been a "hockey man" for as long as Benning was unprepared for that.
They could have easily been thinking, "We'll clear space. If we can find a good deal, great, if not, it doesn't matter because we're not contenders anyway."
You're convinced Benning is a complete idiot because he didn't sign overpriced forwards after saying he wants to contend? That's a stretch.
We don't have a log jam on D.
If we have two injuries to any one of our top 4 (happens every season), we'd be on the verge of icing:
Edler-Bieksa
Sbisa-Corrado
AHLer-AHLer
Going 6 deep without a trusty 7th is a bad idea, and that's exactly what we have no assuming Sbisa doesn't turn into a healthy scratch.
Yeah, there's absolutely no log jam on D. To say otherwise — which seems to have become a common thing here — is a complete revisionist history. Every single year we have top 4 Ds missing 50 games minimum. Sometimes it's two of them at the same time. Who's going to play in the top 4 for that time — Corrado, Stanton, Sbisa? Before Benning got here, all people screamed about is how this team needed at least five Top 4 capable guys to be able to compete.
And really, if they wanted to dump Garrison then fine but perhaps they should've targeted a young puck moving defenseman to come back and fill one of those 3rd pairing spots?
We do have a logjam on D, especially with Corrado coming up. You can't spend 4-5M on #5 D-men just in case of injury, the cap won't allow that. You pretty much just have to hope that you can get lucky enough not go through major injury trouble at playoff time.
Yes, we do have a terrible history when it comes to D-men health, but you still can't prepare for that, not with a cap. The best you can do is try to acquire some good 5/6/7 guys that you hope will be able to hold their own whenever their role is increased due to injury to the players in front of them. Kind of like what Martinez did for the Kings this year.